


far away to the point that i cant even see the universe

by jesimiel



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Major Character Undeath, Multi, Open Ending, don't even look at me, sort of. you guys tell me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:48:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26882440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jesimiel/pseuds/jesimiel
Summary: june 16-june 18, 2018. the crew of thedaedalusreunites.
Relationships: Carter Chilcott & Manuela Dominguez & Jan Kilbride, Carter Chilcott/Manuela Dominguez/Jan Kilbride
Comments: 8
Kudos: 28





	far away to the point that i cant even see the universe

**Author's Note:**

> idk how happy i am with this one, it was meant to be longer but it wasn't really working. also i have trouble writing manuela??? but yeah anyway i think about the fucked up astronauts constantly talk to me about them [here](http://mag055.tumblr.com)

**II - the high priestess**

_the dark_

a card of mystery, stillness and passivity. this card suggests that it is time to retreat and reflect upon the situation and trust your inner instincts to guide you through it. things around you are not what they appear to be.

**keywords:** _hidden talents, intuition, mystery, spiritual insight, things yet to be revealed_

**keywords (reversed):** _information withheld, lack of personal harmony, secrets_

* * *

in 2008, manuela dominguez reads the news, and she sees the story of that earthquake in america, the one that levelled a city, and she knows what the archivist has done.

her tears are thicker than they should be, darkly translucent and seawater-salty, stinging her blurry vision. she fully crumples over the newspaper in her hands and almost knows the phantom crush of the Buried, wracked with sudden grief she can’t explain, doesn’t _understand_ , didn’t even know that she had room left _inside_ of her for. she fancies she can feel the burning gaze of the Eye upon her back as she digs her fingers into her hair and _wails._

she’s trussied herself up as aloof and detached, told herself that she couldn’t care less about the archivist’s hollow cruelty, brushed off as for the greater good. perhaps she couldn’t, once upon a time, but no matter how she slices it, that time isn’t now. 

_come on, come on, dominguez_ , she tells herself, _you’ve **killed** people_—but the same manuela dominguez that kept someone locked in a soundproof box for six months is now barefoot on her kitchen floor, bubbling over with strange, unfamiliar sorrow, with brackish-water tears running down her face. 

(there is mold in on her shower walls, growing along the spots where the tiles meet. it’s not particularly _rude_ mold, but she glares at it all the same as she washes her hair, trying not to get soap in her eyes. after the _daedalus_ had landed, she'd gone back to jan's apartment with him—not for any real reason, she just hadn't wanted to be alone—and he'd let her. she'd used his shower. jan’s shower walls didn’t have mold between the tiles. why does she remember that?

she hadn’t really liked him, had hardly even _known_ him. she’d thought him more than slightly bullheaded, distant and scatterbrained even at the best of times, so why does she remember that there wasn’t mold between the tiles of his shower walls, and why does she cry for him upon his death?)

she sits in her bedroom and thinks to herself. she wonders if the Buried is Dark. she wonders if jan is afraid of the Dark. she wonders if _she_ is afraid of the Dark. she must be, she reasons. there is no purpose to it without fear. even her own. 

she knows that it probably, in the grand scheme, doesn’t really even matter. something very Vast of her to decide, she thinks, and forces herself not to cry once more.

(at the bottom of the half-filled pit that was once bucoda, washington, jan kilbride does not think of anything at all.)

she gets over it quickly, though. or perhaps bottles it up—she can never tell. her misplaced grief is quieted within the week, and she returns to work.

she hasn't thought about the other one that much, to be honest, spare a quiet sting of pity when she remembered his condition upon the landing of the satellite. she wonders, now, if he's alright.

* * *

she runs from the archivist, from the detective, and for a long sticky saltwater-taffy moment all she knows is pure, icy fear. of being seen, of being _known,_ of the watcher-girl’s gun that blew a hole in her calf and the Eye’s shining star with fury in his burnt gaze, of her _everything_ crashing down around her.

her dark star is gone, the archivist is gone, the detective is gone, and she has realized too late that the door to the warehouse was not always and was never meant to be painted yellow.

distortion welcomes her giddily, which is a grotesque thing in and of itself. the hallways stretch infinitely and slightly to the right, and wherever manuela dares to walk, the fluorescent overhead bulbs crack and shatter. 

for a while, or perhaps for half an hour, fury drives her. she screams and screams and pounds her fists against the walls and drives her sharp elbows and knees into the warped mirrors and strange paintings.

and then it is despair that creeps in. not quite the numbing fog of the Lonely, not a fear that nobody else was _there_ —because, she knows, distortion has been gleefully watching all of this—but a bone-deep certainty that she will never be leaving this carpeted, wallpapered corridor, even after her hair curls and her pupils begin to spin and her mind twists and snaps to pieces.

distortion steps in front of her with feet that aren’t feet but are still somehow wearing spike heels and leans down without leaning down and says, _i do pity you, darkling. you are without anything, anyone. perfect bait for Forsaken, if i may say so._

_i hate you,_ manuela wails. _i hate you, i hate you._

_i know. what can i do to change that, my dear?_ distortion sounds bizarrely genuine—at least, as genuine as a monster of the Spiral can be. manuela can actually only think of one answer to that question, one that she wasn’t expecting to rip its way out of her throat only partially unbidden but does anyway, drawn out into the open by the disgustingly bright lights of the corridor the same way her stung eyes begin to brim anew with more fucking _tears._

_bring them back,_ she pleads, collapsed on her knees like the little girl she still is deep inside, _please, bring them back to me._ she doesn't clarify, but distortion regards her with eyes that make her insides want to wring themselves out like a dishrag before drawing up to full impossible twisting height and grinning, _as you wish._

carter is standing in the frame of the faraway yellow door when distortion opens it, and manuela could nearly scream—he looks almost exactly how she remembers, and it’s half a relief and half a concern when she sees _all_ of him, his hung head, the dense fog rolling off of him and out of him in waves—and then he looks up, and he actually seems to _see_ her, and then the mist is evaporated out of everywhere except the space between his glasses and his eyes, and he yells, _is that you? manuela?_

she actually does shriek back this time, a wordless, jumbled noise of gratitude and surprise and sheer relief, and stands up and launches herself at him at mach speed. he just barely manages not to get bowled over, but she’s small and he manages, strong and steady on his feet, the last of the fog clearing from his glasses as he holds her like she’s the only life preserver in the pacific ocean and his safety raft just sunk.

distortion coils around them laughingly but she doesn’t care, doesn’t even _care,_ doesn’t even care that she should be _better_ than this. she isn’t a _child_ that cries like this at the drop of a hat, that should be consoled by carter’s hand in her hair and cheek to her temple and voice in her ear—and yet she is.

_holy shit,_ he says on a long exhale. _manuela._

he doesn’t ask _what happened,_ doesn’t ask _where are we,_ doesn’t ask anything at all—just says her name, and it’s almost enough to knock her knees out from under her because it’s been so long since anyone besides herself has said her name, and it’s really only at that second that she realizes how desperately, ironically _lonely_ she has been, with her face in the crook of carter’s shoulder and her eyes squeezed shut to put her back in at least a little sliver of Dark.

_i can still help,_ comes distortion’s laughing voice, nebulously, from some direction. manuela doesn’t really care enough to figure out which one, cheeks still damp and head still resting against carter’s shoulder. she feels his hold on her tighten just a little as distortion speaks. _return the last to you._

_no,_ says manuela sharply. _he’s gone. dead. i don’t have time for your tricks._ carter hums questioningly, but she ignores it. she’ll break the news to him later.

_gone, yes. for a given value, of course, in that “gone” is sometimes used to simply mean “not here, at the present second,” rather than, in fact, out of existence altogether. but dead? i’m afraid not,_ distortion rattles amusedly from behind them. a lock clicks open, and manuela whirls around, still not letting her grip on carter falter. 

another yellow door stands in front of them, tantalizingly close. _a shortcut,_ distortion tinkles discordantly, _to the vastling’s hiding place._ grinning eyes and twisting mouth slightly too large for the face, voice laced with staticky, echoing laughter. carter shudders. 

_you lie,_ manuela accuses. distortion shrugs.

_of course i do. he **is** here, though._

manuela pauses, considering. sneaks a glance at carter, who just seems nervous. finally, she nods, and if it’s possible (which it isn’t, betraying the exact reason it happens at all) distortion’s smile grows even wider. 

_you’ll take it, i take it?_

_right,_ breathes manuela.

_left,_ says distortion nonsensically.

_i’m just happy he’s still in one piece, i suppose,_ carter mutters, in his confusion, trying to force the pros to outweigh the cons. 

distortion cackles like a screeching, scratching record, intoning a musical _i didn’t say that_ before theatrically whisking open the door.

it opens to a view of an open field.

manuela curses under her breath before feeling a too-long, too-sharp hand shove her roughly between the shoulder blades and she gasps as she falls out, out of distortion altogether, off of the slightly raised frame of the yellow door, and onto her hands and knees in the north american dirt.

she hears the door creak-snap shut and she spins around frantically, sure that distortion has kept carter behind and that she will be alone again, but no—there he is, pulling to his feet and dusting off his pant legs, the door nowhere in sight. at his feet, there lie two shovels, a dizzying fractal etched into the flat of each blade with what manuela knows must have been distortion’s fingernails. _very classy, helen. what Buried scrub did you swipe these off of?_

she reaches forward and picks one up. carter does the same.

_now what?_ he asks.

manuela sighs. _we dig._

and so they do.

* * *

**V - the hierophant**

_the vast_

stands for tradition and convention. it can represent marriage in an arranged setup. it can also mean a teacher or counsellor who will help in learning / education of the querent.

**keywords:** _education, religion, seeking counsel or advice, spiritual guidance, tradition_

**keywords (reversed):** _abuse of position, breakdown, poor counsel, rejection of family values_

* * *

manuela wonders if distortion plans on coming back for them; they seem to be a long way from the nearest city, considering the one that used to be where they stand is more than six feet under. 

she’s not keeping track, just barely registering the itchy unwelcome sunlight on her neck, but she thinks they’ve probably been there for about a day and a half when her shovel strikes something that is not the texture of loose soil and rock.

_found him,_ she says quietly, because she knows she has, and lets the shovel fall, dropping to her knees and beginning to scrabble at the dirt with just her blistered, calloused fingers, getting filth on the knees of her trousers and deep under her bitten-down nails. she might be crying again—the dust at her hands is slowly becoming saltwater mud, and her vision is so blurry that she only notices carter kneeling at her side when he reaches over to help her dig.

unearthing a neatly severed left arm is almost, _almost_ enough to make her vomit. she can’t fathom why she cares so much, or why out of all she’s ever seen, this is what threatens to break her iron stomach. she perseveres, though. she thinks she might have cracked if she didn’t already know what the archivist had done to him. she’s mildly surprised that carter hasn’t, but she supposes that anyone with a strong enough constitution to brute-force their way out of the grasp of the Lonely might not find a chopped-off body part all that distressing. 

(or perhaps he does, and is just hiding it for the sake of slowing down the shaking of her shoulders. either way, she appreciates it.)

by manuela’s best estimate, it takes about four hours to pull every part of jan kilbride’s body out of the washington mud. she counts fifteen parts in all; the archivist wasn’t very symmetrical in her deed, leaving his left arm in one piece and his right in about three, his right leg in halves and his left in fourths, his torso whole and his abdomen sliced off at the waist. 

they find his head at the very bottom of the little pit they’ve dug, as though the archivist had tossed it in first, like she couldn’t stand to see his face as she had carried on her task.

carter is the one that reaches out first, lifting the head gingerly out of the hole with both hands, bringing it closer to inspect it. jan seems fine, aside from the obvious—he’s free of Corruption, untouched by rot—his eyes are closed, and if not for the neat severance of his head just below his adam’s apple manuela thinks that perhaps he could be asleep. she can’t seem to see whatever the fatal wound had been. she’d been expecting a neat little gunshot, but jan’s temples and forehead and chest are all clear. perhaps the archivist had poisoned him.

carter sits back in the grass, crossing his legs in front of him and holding jan’s head in his hands against the little dip his legs make, looking at it thoughtfully. he uses the pads of his thumbs to brush the particles of soil from jan’s eyelashes, and next to him, manuela leans against his shoulder and reaches out a hand to let it rest against jan’s cold cheek.

manuela is dimly aware that this is the most affection she’s shown to another person in a very, very long time, and it’s to a dead man. carter, to his credit, doesn’t say anything.

she watches jan’s face for a long time, scanning for movement that doesn’t come and holding back another wave of too-thick tears, before carter speaks.

_what do we do now?_

she doesn’t know.

_put him back together, i suppose,_ she says, instead of that. it’s only half-serious, but carter shrugs in a _better-than-nothing_ sort of way and actually moves to do so.

it’s like this: manuela and carter move about six feet to the left of the hole they’d dug, into a slightly greener patch of grass with moonlight (when had it become night-time?) illuminating it, the stars winking above them in enjoyment of the lack of london light pollution, taking jan’s disassembled limbs with them, and lay them out in formation on the ground.

it takes them about twenty minutes to put him back together, arrange him like he’s frankenstein’s goddamn monster, tousle his hair to get the soil out and straighten the shirt and blue jeans that he still seems to be wearing. 

she wonders why she’s doing this. she wonders what sort of strange attachment she had to jan (and carter, for that matter) had been suddenly unearthed after however long she’d been screwing around shattering lights and kicking walls inside of distortion’s corridors. 

(she cared for them, a little bit. perhaps more than she used to think she did. certainly more than she _told_ herself she did, for a while. but she doesn’t like to think about that. 

she doesn’t like to remember the satellite at all, really. nothing done there was anything but evil, in the end. 

she’d like to think of her star as an exception, there, but she isn’t sure if she can anymore. she just tries not to think about it, and tries not to think about the man she’d kept in a box, and tries not to think about the fact that the room where carter’s _experiment_ had been conducted hadn’t been very well soundproofed.)

she places the last piece down (left foot, severed just below the ankle and still in a white sock and muddy gray sneaker) and stands, stepping back to examine their handiwork. nothing happens for a very long moment, and she begins to feel a bit stupid.

the night around her and carter shimmers and writhes. the stars begin to fade, slowly, and then all at once, and manuela stumbles backwards into carter and whispers a strained _what’s happening_ as the sky suffuses into a darkness that should be pleasant, should be comforting, but is far too Vast to be anything like that at all. 

the void is very suddenly absolute, filling every corner of her vision with its magnitude, and it’s all she can do not to call out in fear—she keeps herself from doing so, because she knows that that is exactly what it wants. she has never known the Vast to be so proactive, but perhaps it just likes jan. as much as it can be said to like anything, she supposes.

behind her, carter slips a hand into hers, shaking her out of the reverie the falling sky had dunked her bodily into, and she squeezes it gratefully.

after an indeterminable amount of time, the Vast begins to coalesce into what at first looks like large… tendrils, but soon resolves itself into the shape of what could almost be a massive hand, if the fingers weren’t so long and thin. it reaches down towards where manuela estimates jan’s body to be—it’s still so _dark,_ not the real kind but a choking black velvet void that threatens to worm its way into her lungs and make them burst from the sheer size of it. 

the darkness clears ever so slightly, and she can see what it’s doing to jan, and carter sucks in a surprised breath from somewhere behind her, his hand still in hers, as she squints to make it out. 

it’s… _stitching him back together._

it’s legitimately the only word she can think of to describe it. the mass of ink-dark space and starstuff is weaving its way into the gaps where jan’s limbs are severed and threading between the sliced-off bits like some ethereal yarn. it’s quite strange to watch.

carter whispers a harried _what the hell is it **doing**_ and manuela shakes her head, a motion she realizes belatedly that carter probably can’t see, and makes a confused sort of noise in response. 

all of a sudden, the void is gone. the night sky snaps back to its correct place in the sky, the trees and grass and carter are once again visible, the stars are back above their heads, and jan kilbride’s whole, fully reassembled body lies prone on the field in front of them, points of contact where his limbs had been separated moments before still shimmering slightly with whatever residual stardust the Vast had left on him.

_oh, jesus christ,_ she half-shouts, looking behind her to take in carter’s astonished face, before tiptoeing up to jan and crouching down next to him, gingerly resting the back of her hand against his forehead, and then moving her hand to his neck to check for a pulse.

she doesn’t find one, and he doesn’t seem to be breathing at all, but he’s _warm,_ and it makes her pull her hand back quickly, jerking her head to carter in a _get over here_ motion. he’s at her side in an instant, hands hovering as though he doesn’t know exactly what to do with them, before shoving them in his jacket pockets in a decidedly fierce manner.

below them, there’s a noise. manuela almost jumps out of her skin. she and carter snap their eyes to focus on jan, hardly daring to believe it, but it’s _true_ —he stirs slightly, presses his slack mouth fully closed, squints his eyes without opening them. he flexes his fingers and then his newly attached wrists, grimaces in discomfort, and then manages to pry his eyes fully open, shaking a few stray particles of dust from his lashes. 

manuela decides then and there that she has never seen the color blue before now; anything else that could possibly share the hue turns to gray next to the color of jan’s eyes, bizarrely luminous even in the night surrounding them. 

he stares at her and carter for a good ten seconds, taking in their shocked faces, before rolling over to the other side with a bit of difficulty and proceeding to immediately expel a large quantity of damp earth from his mouth. once he’s apparently finished vomiting mud, he turns back over to face carter and manuela, dragging the back of a hand across the bottom half of his dirty face, and says in a hoarse, dry voice, _hey. what year is it?_

_2018_ , says carter.

_fuck,_ says jan, letting his head hit the ground again. _well, thanks anyway._

manuela just stares. the strangest, most unfamiliar thing she’s ever felt in her life is suffusing her from head to toe—the sudden urgent desire to reach out to jan, gather him in her arms and pull him impossibly close, fold him into a little square like a paper napkin and swallow him like her pica-addled younger self would have so that she might never be without him again—and then it’s gone, just as suddenly, and it’s just her and jan and carter looking at each other in the still night, and then several yards behind them, distortion opens a door.

_success, i see._ distortion leans quietly against the door frame, smiling, waiting, tapping too many too-sharp fingernails against the yellow wood.

_mythic bitch,_ says manuela, completely on reflex. jan snorts a startled laugh, dislodging a stream of dirt from his left nostril, which makes carter laugh in turn, and then manuela, and then all three of them are shaking from the force of their laughter. 

jan’s laughter mostly tails off after a second, right before he sits up with determined eyes, says, _yeah, thanks,_ brushes the dirt from beneath his nose with the back of his wrist, and reaches out to take carter’s face in his shaky hands before drawing him in and kissing him fiercely. 

carter makes a little gaspy noise of surprise before shoving his glasses up into his hair and kissing back, five perfect little smudges of mud on his cheek from jan’s dirt-caked fingers. 

manuela’s insides turn to liquid nitrogen as a cold spike of disgustingly unfamiliar, unwarranted _jealousy_ drives itself through her stomach, made all the worse as she flounders to identify _who_ , exactly, she is jealous _of._

_london calling_ , distortion whistles, making jan and carter jump apart, having forgotten anyone else was there. manuela allows herself four and a half milliseconds of vindication before jumping to the threat assessment that she usually employs whenever distortion deigns to appear in her field of vision.

_what?_

_i said,_ distortion intones, swinging the door open wider to reveal a bustling city street—the frame parked somewhere on the sidewalk, facing the front door of an apartment block. _london calling._

_that’s my building,_ says carter quietly. 

_mister chilcott here is, in fact, the only one of you to still currently and **legally** have a place to live,_ says distortion, only a tad condescendingly. _in my **infinite** goodwill, i’d be glad to drop you off there. surely the illustrious mister kilbride could do with a bath._

manuela wrinkles her nose irritatedly in distortion’s general direction. jan looks down at his shirt, which may, at one point in time, have been white, but is now a thoroughly saturated reddish dirt-brown, and nods in concession. carter shrugs. _okay by me._

wonderful! exclaims distortion, bladed hands clapping together in a gesture of finality. right this way.

it takes carter and manuela a good few minutes to maneuver jan so that he can actually stand up—being in pieces for a decade definitely makes your knees take a hit—but once he’s off the ground, he’s mostly able to walk alright, so carter steadies him with an arm around his waist as manuela pokes her head through the door, scouting out for the perfect moment to step through without alerting anyone on the street. distortion drapes over the frame in a decidedly non-euclidean way. 

_okay, **now.**_

manuela’s timed it well enough so that when distortion spits them out on the sidewalk, the only one who sees is a man walking his dog on the far side of the road, and even then, she doesn’t think he’s registered it. she turns to distortion, head bowed.

_thank you,_ she says sincerely. she isn’t sure why distortion had helped her, but she isn’t going to give any reason to doubt her gratitude. 

distortion smiles widely. _i’ll be there whenever you need me._ it’s a lie, and manuela knows that, so she just gives a short, sharp nod and watches distortion leave through the yellow door that, once shut, once again never existed. 

she skitters across the street after jan and carter, who are far ahead of her, and meets them in the stairwell of carter’s building. carter lives on the third floor, apparently, and he transfers about 5/8 of jan’s weight over to manuela (who is, in all honesty, far too small and skinny for the task) while he turns the key he’d extracted from his pocket into the lock and shoulders open the door.

by manuela’s very scientific estimate, she supposes that, oh, about twenty kilograms of loose soil makes it onto her clothes and skin over the 45-second period she’d had jan’s arm around her shoulders. just the action of stepping into carter’s flat and taking off her shoes shakes about a fourth of it onto the ground, an audible impact of dust particles on the wood floor making her cringe. 

_i’ll vacuum it later,_ says carter, catching her expression. _priorities._

priorities, at the moment, for manuela, turn out to be making sure that jan doesn’t fall and accidentally get killed again by cracking his head on the metal tap of the bathtub while carter runs around through the rest of the flat trying to find places for all of them to sleep, which she accomplishes by sitting on the closed lid of the toilet seat with her chin in her hands while the shower runs out of her sight behind the plastic curtain and listening for the sound of, say, a skull shattering.

thankfully, it doesn’t come. the room is too steamed-up and the curtain is too opaque for her to actually see jan’s silhouette through it, but she can inference pretty accurately what he’s doing from the sounds he makes—a little bouncing noise when he drops a bar of soap, an almost-inaudible squeak when his elbow hits the tiled wall (he’s too big for carter’s shower), a yelp of _oh, that’s fucking gross_ when he first sticks his hair beneath the warm spray and sees ten years’ worth of washington state dirt go down the drain. they don’t talk, but it’s nice to know he’s there.

_hey, can you hand me the towel?_ jan shuts the shower off and sticks a pale, blessedly clean hand out from behind the shower curtain expectantly. there’s still a fine line of mud shoved deep, deep into the beds of his nails, but the rest of his arm is almost spotless. manuela throws the towel underhand across the marginal width of the room, and he catches it, pulling it back behind the curtain to where the rest of him is. _thanks._

manuela hums in response. outside the door, carter’s rummaging through a closet, and the kitchen sink is running. it’s raining a bit and it’s night time again, she can see out of the tiny window in the bathroom, because jan’s been in the shower for almost four hours trying to scrub every grain of the Buried from his skin, and she has no idea how the water hasn’t gone cold by now but certainly isn’t looking a gift horse in the mouth—she’s not touching that bathtub with her bare feet until all the dirt’s out, but maybe there’ll still be hot water later on tonight, and she and carter can use it. 

(there is no mold in carter’s shower, jan confirms. manuela lets her shoulders lose just a midge of tenseness.)

carter apologetically announces, upon jan being dried off and dressed, that he’s about 75% sure that his bed will only fit two people. manuela, who is _a grown woman, god damn it_ , does not comment on the 25% margin of error that implies that carter’s bed may very well, perhaps, fit more than two people, and elects to sleep on his sofa. jan gets the bed, obviously, because he’s been dead for a decade and deserves one, and manuela might be prickly but she isn’t quite rude enough to make carter sleep on the couch in his own flat. 

she’s the shortest out of all of them, five feet three inches exactly, and her head and feet still just barely fit between the armrests of the sofa. she crosses her arms across her chest in a privately petulant sort of way atop the blanket that carter had pulled out of the infinite depths of his linen closet for her and stares at the ceiling until she falls asleep.

* * *

the next morning is hot, and the heat brings fog as the last of last night’s rain evaporates. carter watches it roll across the street with apprehensiveness before quickly and nervously drawing the curtains. manuela pretends not to notice the way that she can see a cloud of winter-cold breath escape his mouth when he exhales, even though it’s already almost seventy-five degrees outside.

carter calls in sick to work, and they sit down at his kitchen table in their mismatched pajamas and eat stale nature valley bars that carter fished out of the back of a cupboard above his stove and they decide to figure out what they are going to do next—because of course there has to be a _next_ , and manuela watches carter blink tiredly with his glasses askew and watches jan tap his fingers restlessly on the wood and thinks that she could just die right here in carter’s kitchen.

their first problem arises when carter and manuela discover that jan is legally dead. this was to be expected, of course, and wouldn’t be as much of an issue in itself were it not for the fact that manuela is also, technically, legally dead. carter shuts his laptop and groans in frustration.

_you two can’t even get **credit cards**. how are you supposed to live in london with me if you don’t have credit cards?_

manuela has to stamp down on a smile at _with me_. it wouldn’t fit her, and she does have an image to uphold, if only for the two of them. jan doesn’t bother, and his grin makes her stomach swoop. _what are you, thirteen? get a grip, dominguez._

_perhaps i just won’t buy anything_ , she says, in an effort to distract herself, showily examining her nails. carter huffs a tired laugh before yawning widely, raising a hand in front of his face as he does. _christ, sorry._

_awake all night?_ manuela asks, staring at carter and trying to keep accusation out of her voice. jan grins again, slightly more mischievously this time, and carter sends a toothless glare his way. 

_no. kilbride just kept clinging onto me like some kind of sea creature._

_i haven’t had any physical human contact in, like, nine years,_ says jan, mock-affront coloring his words. _cut me some slack. ‘scuse me if my sleeping self gets a little touchy._

_you’d be excused if you weren’t six and a half feet tall!_ carter argues, throwing his hands up theatrically. _i’m short! you could throw me like a bag of flour!_

_yeah, maybe._

manuela rests her chin on her hand. _i’m glad that you can joke about it,_ she says, cringing minutely as the words come out a bit more seriously than she would have liked. jan shrugs, crushing a stray granola crumb with his thumbnail.

_doesn’t really matter,_ he says. _not much does._ he swipes the crumbs onto the floor, and carter gives him a dirty look. manuela actually does smile, this time.

_alright,_ says carter abruptly, smacking both hands down on the table. _we have all had a rough past twenty-four hours. we are **going** to have a good day today. what do you guys drink?_

_carter, it’s nine in the morning,_ jan laughs, a grin pushing its way onto carter’s face in turn.

_doesn’t really matter,_ manuela parrots, arching an eyebrow purposefully. _not much does._ carter laughs out loud. jan rolls his eyes, crossing his arms and sitting back in his chair.

_vodka,_ he says after a long second. _no flavoring. the **real** kind, none of that brita filter shit._

_nice,_ says manuela appreciatively. carter considers for a moment.

_i’ve got a half a bottle of stolichnaya left over from my sister’s twenty-seventh birthday._

_that’ll do,_ says jan, tiredly.

* * *

**IX - the hermit**

_the lonely_

suggests that you are in a phase of introspection where you are drawing your attention inwards and looking for answers within. you are in need of a period of inner reflection, away from the current demands of your position.

**keywords:** _introspection, meditation, self-reflection, solitude, soul-searching_

**keywords (reversed):** _exile, loneliness, sadness, withdrawing from loved ones_

* * *

manuela’s mind has functioned almost exactly the same way since she was a child, and it goes like this: 

inside manuela’s mind, there is a cardboard box. inside this box, which is bottomless and does not close, she places everything that she does not want to think about in front of others. and when she is alone, she can rummage through and think about things at her leisure.

this box has always been present in manuela’s mind, although it’s been used more often in some times than in others. for the last four years, for example, she has been alone almost constantly, so there has been no need to stow thoughts inside of it to deal with later, as there was never anybody present to interrupt her in the first place. she has been using the box more over the past thirty-six hours than she has in the last eight months.

manuela relays all of this information to jan and carter somewhere between the second and third bottle of liquor shared between the three of them, about the time they’d abandoned the sofa and the hard-bottomed armchair in favor of sprawling out next to each other on the carpet like teenagers at a sleepover. she isn’t wearing a shirt and her bra clasp is digging into her back with the angle that she’s lying at and her hair is coming loose from its ponytail that it was probably too short to be wrestled into in the first place anyway and she has literally never felt more at home in her entire thirty-nine years of life than she does right now, slumped on the floor of carter’s flat, all three of them drunk out of their minds off of vodka and red wine, as she explains her box. 

carter is on her left side, 7/10 of the way asleep. his face is buried in the dip between manuela’s cheek and collarbone, his glasses jammed against her neck, and his arm is resting on her bare stomach. there’s a plaster on his elbow, and it itches right above her navel, but she doesn’t shift, liking the warm weight across her middle. 

jan is on her right side, starfished on his back. his head is turned to look at her, flushed face the picture of attentiveness. he’s also not wearing a shirt, the heat outside having slowly crept into carter’s flat over the hours, and the pink of his cheeks also touches his chest and shoulders. he looks very, very alive.

manuela stops talking—makes the _effort_ to stop talking, because apparently she’d actually been talking the entire time she’d been observing carter and jan, and has in fact utterly lost her own train of thought—and sits up. she twists at the waist, dislodging carter’s arm, who makes a little _hwuh_ noise at the disturbance, and leans over jan, propping herself up with her right arm against the floor next to his head. her hair is falling in her eyes, blurring her vision. jan’s flush gets a little deeper.

she leans

down

deliberately and for far longer than she feels she actually should have any need to, and she wonders if jan is dilating the distance on purpose, because that seems like something he would be able to do, and then she isn’t actually leaning down at all anymore because he eliminates the problem by just lifting his head to meet her.

he’s not a bad kisser, all things considered, even being ten years out of practice and tasting of alcohol like he does. manuela shifts more fully over him, bracing herself on two elbows instead of one hand. she’s dimly aware of a very wide-awake carter watching raptly as jan rests his hands on her waist. she runs her tongue over one of jan’s canine teeth and can almost feel the starless Vast that now lives within him pouring down her throat, stopping just short of choking her on its enormity, and yeah, it _does_ taste like 80 proof vodka, but who is she to assume otherwise?

jan’s hands slide down past her hips to settle on her upper thighs, warm through the pajamas she’s still wearing, and she sighs quietly. she _has_ missed this. 

carter makes a choking noise. manuela and jan pry themselves apart with a tiny _smack_ that makes carter’s already-flushed face turn an even darker shade, turning to look at him. jan sits up, pushing manuela up with him so that she’s straddling his waist. carter looks equal parts embarrassed and extremely lost, adrift at sea in his own fucking living room.

_should—should i… go?_

_hell no,_ says jan, before manuela can. he lets go of her and reaches out, hauls carter in with a hand on his forearm and a hand on the back of his neck, and kisses him. 

it’s a bit of a breaking point, or at least it sort of seems like it to manuela, because carter blinks in shock, takes a second to take his glasses off entirely, and tosses them onto the coffee table before looping his arms around jan’s shoulders and fully leaning into it. 

a familiar heat pools below manuela’s stomach as she watches them, hears their teeth click. she wonders if carter is a good kisser and vows to find out, internally bemoaning the fact that she doesn’t already know. 

she reaches behind her back and unhooks the clasp of her bra, letting the straps loosen and slide down her shoulders until she can slide it off. carter breaks away from jan to stare at her (mostly at her chest, which was, to be fair, the point) like a deer in headlights—and she’s never understood _that_ one before this exact moment—and jan takes the opportunity while carter’s sufficiently distracted to divest him of his t-shirt. once the offending garment is off, carter’s back to staring at manuela—her face, this time—and she raises her eyebrows in return. 

_is your bed still too small for three?_

* * *

manuela wakes up with 

1\. a headsplitting hangover that makes her skull throb and her eyes feel pressed into her head like raisins  
2\. the morning sun almost directly in her eyes as it streams from the unfortunately-placed and woefully curtainless bedroom window  
3\. a modest collection of red lines pressed into her cheek and shoulder from the wrinkles in the pillowcase she’d finally crashed on  
4\. a pair of pale legs tangled with hers, attached to a bare torso and two arms wrapped around her middle and a head of blonde hair tucked up under her chin  
5\. another pair of arms encircling her waist, accompanied by a knee hiked up against her back and soft breath against the back of her neck

and the only thought that makes it through her headache for a good twenty seconds is _at least the hangover was worth it. christ, i should have done this six years ago._

the next thought that filters in is the fact that her left leg is dead asleep, so she sets about wriggling herself out of the double vice grip in order to try to pound some sensation back into it. carter lets go readily enough, his sleeping self having hardly any upper body strength and opting to let her slip out relatively easily, but jan is another beast entirely, his limbs so tightly entwined with manuela’s that she knows she’ll never be able to remove herself without waking him up. 

as she surreptitiously stretches out her twinging leg and tries to think of a way to extract herself from jan’s strange prison-embrace, she slides her fingertips musingly down the length of his slack arm, feeling for scars or tangible connections where his bits had been… reattached. there aren’t any, as far as she can tell—maybe a few more freckles where the scars should have been, but nothing substantial. none on his stomach, either, or the divots where his hips meet his legs, or around his neck. 

(that’s the one place she thinks there _should_ be a mark, if nowhere else. maybe she’ll get a sharpie and draw one on before he wakes.)

she can’t watch his face like she sort of wants to, since it’s pressed against her upper chest, right between her collarbones, so she just slides a hand into his hair and flexes her ankle some more and tries to ignore how dry her mouth is. 

_christ,_ comes a groan from her other side as carter begins to pull himself into consciousness. _oh, jesus fuck._

_are you feeling alright?_ manuela asks, and though she asks it seriously it’s entirely a joke, because she knows the state carter’s in must mirror her own.

_as okay as i **can** feel while also feeling like i spent the night under the wheels of a lorry._

_yes, well, i think we’re all getting a little old to spend our days having drunk threesomes,_ manuela replies dryly.

_speak for yourself,_ mutters jan. _i’m only thirty._

manuela startles, not realizing he’d woken up. jan doesn’t get up, though, opting instead to wrap his arms a tiny bit tighter against manuela’s middle and press his cheek a tiny bit harder against her chest. carter replies, _you’re **forty**. a decade spent in a pit still counts, you know._

_ugh, no, it doesn’t._

instead of participating in _that_ burgeoning argument, manuela opts to find a slightly more comfortable position, close her eyes against her headache, and go back to sleep.

her dreams are full of twisting corridors.

* * *

**XVIII - the moon**

_the spiral_

a card of illusion and deception, and therefore often suggests a time when something is not as it appears to be. perhaps a misunderstanding on your part, or a truth you cannot admit to yourself.

**keywords:** _deception, difficult period, fear, hidden things, insecurity, mental confusion_

**keywords (reversed):** _insomnia, mysteries unveiled, release of fear, unhappiness, unusual dreams_


End file.
